How would I describe today's GUIs? A mess. -- A mess that grew as new features were needed, with lack of proper design, with a desire to keep backward compatibility, and with tools from the past trying to achieve future needs. I propose a new design philosophy for GUIs. We'll call it Vermaden's GUI. Note: This is the latest entry in our 2008 article contest.

Preferences, preferences, preferences. I have no problem with "Vermaden's GUI" as a concept (it works very well for Sonata), but to propose that it is a all-around better approach is foolishness. The look alternates between minamalistic and cluttered - one of those is a user preference, and the other is universally bad. Spaces are useful as visual cues to separation of elements: forexampletryreadingasentencewithoutthem. You may say they're totally unrelated, but that's the direction that this design heads in.